Deadlock of the Waged Apes

Humanity lived within nature peacefully for millions of years before capitalism. With the
dissolution of feudalism and the transition to capitalism, the alienation of human beings has deepened
byside with the destruction of nature. In capitalism, the position of human is compressed into the
limits set by capitalism itself. As a definition what is included in the human position is broader. It
includes the environment in which a person is born, the state of the city in which he lives, the
conditions of maturation and the working conditions. The living condition of a person affects
his/her/them consciousness.

As per the laws of capitalism, everything is for the market and the needs of the market. A person
either produces for the market or owns the monopoly in the market. A person is either working on the
ship or the owner a ship. Capitalism deepens this duality. In addition, capitalism monopolizes some
areas of production. The dissolution of feudalism in the rural area is also reflected in the small
business and other business lines.

“The Hairy Ape” is a play by American playwright Eugene O'Neill that portrays the alienated
position of human in industrial capitalism. Workers, who work on the ship, drink in their spare times
and have no one elses except each other, describe how life was formed for them from the first scene.
The workers do not have a home to go, a life that goes beyond the ship, and no other missions for
them other than working. They work to survive and then they continue work to survive again. What
distinguishes Yank, Paddy and Long, and Mildred and Mildred's father are the living conditions and
the class they belong to. Long “'E says this 'ere stinkin' ship is our 'ome. And 'e says as 'ome is 'ell.
And 'e's right! This is 'ell. We lives in 'ell, Comrades—and right enough we'll die in it. (...) And who's
ter blame, I arsks yer? We ain't. We wasn't born this rotten way. All men is born free and ekal." refers
to the share allocated to them. The place where they work is the place where they spend most of their
life, and their so-called homes. The value of their labor is nothing more than a life that is only a
reproduction process of labor that allows them to survive until the next day.

In the reproduction process, a person is a slave that serves the market owner only in the class
she/he/them is in. The only difference from a slave is the freedom to not dying, which comes with
affording the food for enough to come to work the next day. As Marx points out:

“(...) man (the worker) only feels himself freely active in his animal
functions—eating, drinking, procreating, or at most in his dwelling and in
dressing-up, etc.; and in his human functions he no longer feels himself to be
anything but an animal. What is animal becomes human and what is human
becomes animal. Certainly eating, drinking, procreating, etc., are also
genuinely human functions. But taken abstractly, separated from the sphere of
all other human activity and turned into sole and ultimate ends, they are
animal functions." (Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of
1844)

Karl Marx wrote Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 between April and August of
1844. This passage of Marx is from the section where he explains the elements that constitutes the
alienation of labour. Before this passage, he also touched upon the mental effects of alienation of
labor in his text. Well, we can very well bring the description made in this passage side by side with
the descriptions in The Hairy Ape text. In fact, we can even say that the author wanted to make
visible such an alienation process and the political atmosphere of his period through his observations.

What author described with “the bewildered, furious, baffled defiance of a beast in a cage” is the
same description of Marx’s “what is human becomes animal.”

Paddy remembers the old days when they were a part of the ship. We can read this as a reference
to the process when the effects of the monopolization was not sharp as it is in present. It may also be
a blink to the pre-capitalist feudal era rather than a chronologically connected process by the author.
Now those who work on board are alienated to the ship and to their own labor. People no longer
belonged to the ship and were not part of it. They are slaves of the owner of the ship. They are caged
in by steel from a sight of the sky like bloody apes in the Zoo like Paddy's expression. Only a flesh
and blood wheel of the engines they would have be in the industrial capitalism.

“(...)But with the development of industry, the proletariat not only

increases in number; it becomes concentrated in greater masses, its
strength grows, and it feels that strength more. The various interests
and conditions of life within the ranks of the proletariat are more and more
equalised, in proportion as machinery obliterates all distinctions of
labour, and nearly everywhere reduces wages to the same low level.
The growing competition among the bourgeois, and the resulting
commercial crises, make the wages of the workers ever more
fluctuating. The increasing improvement of machinery, ever more rapidly
developing, makes their livelihood more and more precarious (...)" (Karl
Marx and Friedrich Engels, Communist Manifesto)

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote “The Communist Manifesto” as a pamphlet in 1848. This
passage highlights the effects of industrial capitalism on human positions and the worsening living
conditions of the proletariat class to which our protagonist belongs.

"I care for nobody, no, not I,

And nobody cares for me."

This is a significant verse from the play that looks like a touching summary of a miserable and
also a sympathetic life of a person who is not from the upper class. Actually it is certainly not a
touching summary. It's only a harsh result of the capitalism that promises a lot but steals a lot instead.

If in the given conditions the system teaches us to "drink, don't think " then it is a sign to the time
for not only start thinking but also to changing somethings.

Zeynep Büşra Islak

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